All posts copyright 2013–2017 by Mark Aldrich.

On Trial for Tweets: Nabeel Rajab

One of the inadvertent effects of Bahrain’s current campaign of aggressive repression against those it deems dissidents is the simplest one: Bahrain validates the dissidents, proves their testimonies of brutality, physical and psychological torture, and repression one-hundred percent correct.

One of the other effects, of course, is this: Bahrain’s campaign of repression stokes dissent, and dissenters become easier to identify, arrest, attempt to silence. Right now, Bahrain is making life dangerous for thousands of people as it places a choke-hold on parts of its population: Shia, human rights activists, those people unlucky enough to not be born in the ruling Al Khalifa family.Bahrain uses nebulous phrases in its charges against dissidents: “offending national institutions,” “creating an extremist sectarian environment,” “threatening to use unlawful means” to effect regime change. The results of convictions under these vague charges are not at all vague: long prison sentences, often served in solitary confinement.

Rajab spent the last two weeks in solitary detention without being informed of what the charges against him are.

Also in the last two weeks, Bahrain announced that it intends to strip citizenship from Sheikh Isa Qasim, the Shia spiritual leader of the main opposition group, Al Wifaq. With yet more vague language, it accused him of “creating an extremist sectarian environment” and said he had “encouraged sectarianism and violence.” On June 14, Bahrain announced that it will seize Al Wifaq’s funds, close its headquarters, and shut it down.

Bahrain’s official news agency reported that Al Wifaq has “worked for decades on diverting from the concept of the state, [and to] secure legal cover for acts associated with extremism and terrorism.” Al Wifaq is the second-largest political party in Bahrain and in 2012 organized all the opposition parties and got them to sign a “Declaration of Non-Violence.”

Rajab’s arrest on June 13 took place on the same day that the United Nations Human Rights Council opened its 32nd session in Geneva, Switzerland. The day before that, six Bahrain human rights activists were prevented from boarding flights from Bahrain to travel to the UNHRC sessions.

Bahrain has long employed that tactic of repression: forbidding activists from leaving the country to tell the world what is happening behind closed borders. At the sessions, their absence became an important and revelatory presence.

Indeed, the events of the last month—from the forced exile of human rights activist Zainab Al-Khawaja and her two children, the travel ban imposed at the airport on the six activists, and Rajab’s arrest—make it appear that Bahrain has re-entered (if it ever left) a singularly repressive phase. After Rajab was released in July 2015, a one-year travel ban was imposed on him. As we are still within that one year time period, Rajab was not attempting to travel to Geneva for the UNHCR sessions. He was arrested anyway.

This is the third time Rajab has been arrested since the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011. Last year he was charged with “harming civil peace” through his use of Twitter. The Tweets earned him solitary confinement.

In previous incarcerations, Rajab had been tortured but last year he was not, which he took as an encouraging sign, he told VICE News after his release. His “treatment this time was much more respectful, … [which] ‘led me to believe that they want to release me.'”

Rajab was released last July through a pardon from King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa for “health reasons.” Pardons for health reasons—or for any reason—are always a good thing, but rarely do such single-reason pardons indicate a general relaxation of the policies that may lead a repressive nation to detain, charge with crimes, convict, and imprison individuals.

Bahrain is an American ally. The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is stationed there; every once in a while some members of Congress with human rights interests will raise the possibility of our moving our Fifth Fleet and its several thousand sailors and millions of dollars elsewhere and just as quickly lobbyists will take to the airwaves and visit the halls of Congress in defense of our good ally, our “key Gulf ally,” Bahrain. (For those readers who are viewers of the several Sunday morning television programs devoted to politics and policy like “Meet the Press,” please be aware that most if not all of those who are brought on as “experts” about any given story find most of their expertise in their wallets as they argue on behalf of the side that spends more on public relations.)

In the last two decades, Bahrain first transformed itself from a nation that employed torture and long prison sentences without trials into one that did not. In 2001, Amnesty International celebrated the change. That is not an easy thing to accomplish. It was real, but it did not last long.

By 2007, it was known that Bahrain was employing torture once again and subjugating its Shiite majority population, much like its close ally, Saudi Arabia, which is also ruled by a Sunni dynasty, does. By 2011, human rights organizations were alarmed and Foreign Policy magazine listed Bahrain as the third-place nation out of eight nations that it called “America’s Unsavory Allies.”

Bahrain has been ruled by one family, the Al Khalifa dynasty (sometimes published as al-Khalifa), since 1783. That family still occupies about 50% of all government positions.

In 1999, the current leader, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, inherited the title of Amir (emir) on the death of his father; in 2002, confronted with the re-institution of a parliament and democratic elections, he re-structured the government to make certain that democracy could never touch the Al Khalifa family, and he declared himself a permanent fixture in any future government, the first-ever King of Bahrain.

The Al Khalifa clan and thus the whole of the government of Bahrain are Sunni, but the majority of the population is Shiite. That sort of split between population and non-representative government always leads to a form of apartheid for the disenfranchised population, especially when the dis-empowered population is the larger one.

In 2011, as the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns spread across the region, Bahrain’s crackdown was notoriously bloody: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent troops to quell the protests. Dozens were killed. That word “torture” appears in report after report, again and again.

Bahrain’s allies in world business were dismayed and the United States briefly delayed some arms sales to the country, which sparked Bahrain to pursue a course in 2011 and 2012 that looked and sounded so much like reform that its international relationships were salvaged. Simply repeating the word “reform” many times in a row is not reform. That was Bahrain’s approach, however, and it worked: in 2015, the Obama Administration restored some military arrangements that the United States had blocked after the bloody 2011 crackdowns.

The U.S. State Department spokesman, John Kirby, said last year, “While we do not think that the human rights situation in Bahrain is adequate, … we believe it is important to recognize that the government of Bahrain has made some meaningful progress on human rights reforms and reconciliation.”

It is time to recognize that that “meaningful progress” has been reversed, and so should our positive diplomatic assessments of Bahrain.

Human rights organizations have regularly listed Bahrain among terrible violators, and the world is deaf to it. Bahrain’s money, its many arms deals (just one was a $90 million agreement with Lockheed Martin in 2013 on top of a sale of a dozen fighter jets), and its lobbying efforts keep our government willfully deaf, however.

It was and is an ominous statement. His country has spent the last two weeks putting cruel action behind those words.

The irony is that if a powerful country like Bahrain would heed the requests of the United Nations High Commissioner, the Commission would not be “powerless.” Both Bahrain and the UNHCR would benefit from enhanced international esteem. This point always seems to elude repressive governments.

Meanwhile, Nabeel Rajab, Sheikh Isa Qasim, Zainab Al-Khawaja, and thousands of others await Bahrain’s next steps further into the dark.

____________________________________________Follow The Gad About Town on Facebook! Subscribe today for daily facts (well, trivia) about literature and history, plus links to other writers on Facebook.